Archives for January 2007

>The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages (Viking) is the winner of the 2007 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The award is presented to a children’s or young adult book published in English by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas. A standing committee (Ann Carlson; Hazel Rochman, chair; and Roger Sutton) selects […]

>Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, a government funded watchdog and advocacy group, takes issue with the Decibel Penguin Prize, an Arts Council-funded contest for short stories from U.K. writers from Asian, African, or Caribbean backgrounds. (Thanks to Galleycat for the link.) The debate sounds familiar. And while Marc Aronson (and Andrea Pinkney in her response) […]

By Lois Ehlert I was hoping to fly out here with Leaf Man. But yesterday a strong wind blew Leaf Man away. He left no travel plans. Maybe he’s here. Could be in the park. Or floating on the river. If you see Leaf Man, please pick him up and take him home with you. […]

>That was the summer-reading-club theme once proposed by a group of blackhearted children’s librarians in my Chicago Public Library days; I thought of it today when I saw on PUBYAC a query about “read for fines” programs, wherein children can work off their overdue book fines through time spent doing some sustained silent reading in […]

>We saw Children of Men on Saturday. I was kind of dreading it, having seen the preview so many times for the past year, and then reading reviews of how depressing it was. (We were taking out our friend Pam for her birthday and I wondered if Dreamgirls might be more suitably upbeat.) But as […]

>We have also just posted on the website some Horn Book articles by and about the writers we mourn as the year turns, Mary Stolz and Philippa Pearce. Both Mary Stolz’s tribute to Ursula Nordstrom and Susan Cooper’s to Tom’s Midnight Garden are rich.

>Our Beatrix Potter expert Lolly Robinson will have a review of Miss Potter online for you on Monday; in the meantime, take a look at Lolly’s article about Potter’s friendship with Horn Book founder Bertha Mahony Miller. The debate about the success of Renee Zellweger’s impersonation reminds me of a story Australian YA novelist Nick […]

>While conventional wisdom has it that the young adult novel was born in the late sixties with books such as The Outsiders and The Pigman, let’s have a reflective pause for Mary Stolz, who died last month at the age of 86. Although most remembered now for the middle-grade novels A Dog on Barkham Street […]